OSD 330: The rise of sensorship
Imagine you’re buying a new thermostat for your house. But suppose you live in an alternate universe where the thermostats are a little different:
They don’t have numbers. No temperature numbers, no humidity numbers.
There isn’t even such a thing as a thermometer or a temperature scale. Everyone describes temperatures in subjective terms.
Different people prefer different groups of subjective terms. Some people describe temperature in terms of the clothes you’d wear, others describe it in terms of what time of year they feel it matches, and so on.
Indoor climate control would obviously be a mess in that universe. One or two degrees matters for comfort, and forget about controlling things like condensation or mold prevention.
Thermostats are an area where this is a solved problem. The playbook is:
Creating an objective set of measurements.
Checking performance against those measurements.
Iteratively improving products and techniques to perform better.
Sounds obvious, but there are a lot of areas where nobody has done those steps. An easy example: buy an indoor air quality monitor. See what happens to the CO2 level when you sleep with the door closed, or what happens to particulate and VOC levels when you cook. We went 100+ years with modern kitchens and everyone was none the wiser. It took maybe two years of easy access to air quality monitors for people to realize that 100+ years of nonchalance was severely mistaken.
Another example: have one beer after dinner, wait two hours, and go to sleep. You’ll probably feel fine in the morning. But if you have a sleep tracking device, you’ll see a disruption to your sleep in the second half of the night. You’ll also see that your resting heart rate while you slept was 5-10 beats per minute faster than it would have been without alcohol. This isn’t to say there’s anything wrong with a cold beer. It’s just notable that basic information about alcohol goes from being basically unknown for hundreds of years to being nearly common knowledge at this point, and all it took is widespread access to a basic measuring device.
Sensors are the key to improvement. The better your sensor, the better your feedback loop. And a feedback loop is how things get better.
Mapping that to the gun world, you can sort things into three categories.
Examples where good sensors are the norm:
Competition (shot timers)
Long range shooting
Body armor
Examples where sensors are coming onto the scene but still nascent:
Suppressors, with Pew Science’s data
Drones (obviously laden with sensors, but objective standards are tbd)
Bullet effectiveness
Sensors? What sensors?:
Recoil
Less lethal weapons
This is a good way to think of startup ideas. Which fields are waiting to be turned upside-down by better measurement tools?
This week’s links
On the case of the man sentenced to 20 years in prison for owning a bunch of stuff the ATF falsely claimed is illegal
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Imagine if the federal health department (CDC, NIH, etc...) used their...er our tax dollars to help in the suppression of rifle sound signature?
Like PewScience.com
How many combat veterans would NOT be walking around with either tinnitus or hearing loss.
Objective measurements only cause improvements if they're measuring something useful. Improvements to easily measurable quantities often come at the opportunity cost of harder-to-quantify changes that would improve the overall product more, and some are even actively harmful. For example:
Smartphone manufacturers emphasizing camera resolution led to a megapixel count arms race with little improvement in picture quality. Enthusiast electronics specifications frequently go down this path (display resolution, mouse DPI, processor core count, etc.) Conversely, software improvements to smartphone cameras, which are very hard to measure objectively, massively improved picture quality.
Commit count and lines of code are easy to quantify, but not causal of software quality. GitHub can't objectively measure quality, so their activity feed counts commits, which incentivizes an increase in volume without a corresponding increase in quality.
Medical tests and screenings are often overused or improperly targeted (e.g. mammography in elderly women), leading to higher costs, patient distress, and improper diagnoses without significant improvements in overall health. Continuous fetal heart rate monitoring (vs. intermittent) during delivery leads to significantly more interventions without significantly better outcomes for mother or child.
Access to irrelevant information simply isn't a net good. The key sentence here is:
> This isn’t to say there’s anything wrong with a cold beer.